Hell Yeah You Can Be Employed & An Entrepreneur!

Video Transcript

One of the things I get asked a lot when I'm helping people turn ideas into businesses on my program noship.co is whether it's a binary choice to be an entrepreneur or to be employed. And there are lots of people who have strong opinions about where this lives. Should you only be employed or should you only be an entrepreneur? And employees often dislike the risk involved in being an entrepreneur.

And entrepreneurs often dislike the certainty that is involved in being employed. And entrepreneurs will tell you that you can't get rich if you're employed. And employees will tell you that you can't get rich if you're an entrepreneur because the risk is too high. I do not believe it's a binary choice.

I think that we live in a world where you are able to consult or you're able to do two or three or four days of work and spend an hour or two a day or even a week and build something of your own. I think that this dichotomy that we're forcing is a false dichotomy. I don't believe that you have to pick. And what I do on No Bullship is help people understand the size of the business that they're trying to build.

One of the problems with building businesses 10 or 15 years ago, is the hype is all Silicon Valley based and shoot the lights out. So, you either need to be aiming to be a unicorn, which means have a billion dollar valuation, or you're a useless guy who can't build anything and you'll never make it out alive. I think that the gap here is closing. I don't think that anymore we are thinking in those binary terms.

And if you are, it's time to readjust. One of the things that I help people do to make this much more visceral is to give you a question. What does success look like for this business? Is it a million dollars a month?

Is it a million dollars a year? Is it having some money to save for university? Is it whatever your definition? Then how much effort and energy do you believe you have to put in on a day or a weekly basis to reach that version of success?

And let me break it down to you this way. If you believe that you can build a million dollar a month business but only spend an hour a week on that business, you're screwed. That's just unrealistic, completely ignorant, and is never going to work. And if you can tell me that you can do that, you're either lying or you aren't spending as much time on this and getting the success that you want.

I just don't see that as possible. However, if you are trying to slowly build a million-doll a month business over a 10-year period and you can only currently spend one hour every week building the foundations towards that business, that's no problem. That's realistic. That's the kind of lifestyle that you want to have because the version of success that you're aiming for needs to fit into the kind of life you have today.

And if you are employed and you want to do a side business, I would not throw your the baby out with the bath water here. Stick to your employment. Over time, you can start discussing with your employer if you want to do a half day less every week because you're starting to generate income on your side business or 1 day less or 2 days less and then work for 3 days for somebody else and 4 days for yourself. That's 7 days in a week.

Remember, days of the week were invented by men. That's that's not real. There's no such thing as a day of the week. you just go by because that's what everybody goes by.

So this false binary that we're creating between you should either be employed or you should either be an entrepreneur, I think is wrong. I don't think you need to choose anymore. I think employers are much more open to letting people work one day a week on their own thing and getting back the salary expense of that one day. Or I think that employees understand that with AI tools, with the new world we're in, you can get more done in the four or 3 days that they're paying you to be full-time employees.

I think that the shape of work is changing and I think that the shape of entrepreneurship is changing. And I think that the world that we live in today requires both of these things to live simultaneously together. I don't believe that you can be a full-time employee anymore and save the money that you want for your future and your retirement and benefits and expanding your life. Equally, I feel like so many people are able to start businesses today that would never be able to do that before that it is more competitive and you need a bigger edge.

So, you need to be able to have your little nest egg 2 or 3 days a week of employment to fund the building of your side projects to take pressure off yourself and your employer. I think these two things are symbiotic. What you need to figure out is what you want to do, what your love is for this thing. Do you have a problem that you want to build so intensely that you want to commit your evenings, one or two hours an evening or 2 or 3 hours a week or one day a weekend to figure out if this thing is real?

Because in 2026, the only thing stopping you from building something isn't your employer. Employees who blame employers for this are totally off the mark. they're not taking responsibility and they're victimizing themselves as if the employer is preventing them from working in their own time. Your employer has no right to say what you do in your spare time.

So, if you want to build something, you're the only person holding yourself back. Employment and entrepreneurship can live together in the new world. All you need to decide is how.